Buke and Gase

Brooklyn's Buke and Gase (formerly Buke and Gass), an outfit comprising Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez, who played together in the post-punk band Hominid, took its name from two of the instruments the pair created and use to make their music: A buke is a baritone ukulele and a gase is a combination of guitar and bass. The homemade instruments don't stop there, and while this could be seen as a mere gimmick, Dyer and Sanchez have proven themselves to be solid songwriters. Although homemade instruments are often associated with Americana, noise or the avant-garde, these guys use idiosyncratic sounds to make something accessible yet undeniably weird — like Factrix or Black Humor in a pop-oriented mode. Buke and Gase's latest, General Dome, is the follow-up to its critically-acclaimed 2010 album Riposte.

Tom Murphy is a writer, visual artist and musician who grew up three blocks from Denver in Aurora, Colorado. As an anthropologist/historian of the Denver music scene and connected music/art communities around the world, Murphy has spent a good deal of his adult life accumulating related knowledge, connecting dots and documenting. He once reviewed 40 shows in 36 days for Westword but is all better now